appreciate the difference between British rule and the domination that
has now been swept away.

Recent reports on all sides show the desire for peace and the end of the
war; for war brings in its train forced labour, the requisition of food,
and the curse of German Askaris wandering about among the native
villages, satisfying their every want, often at the point of the
bayonet. Preferable even to this are the piping times of peace, when the
German administrator, with rare exceptions, singularly unhappy in his
dealing with the chiefs, would not hesitate to thrash a chief before his
villagers, and condemn him to labour in neck chains, on the roads among
his own subjects. And this, mark you, for the failure of the chief to
keep an appointment, when the fat-brained German failed to appreciate
the difference in the natives' estimation of time. By Swahili time the
day commences at 7 a.m. In the past, it was no wonder that chiefs,
burning with a sense of wrong and the humiliation they had suffered,
preferred to raise their tribe and perish by the sword than endure a
life that bore such indignity and shame.

But our job has not been rendered any easier by the difficulty we have
experienced in pacifying the simple blacks by attempts to dispel the
fears of rapine and murder at the hands of our soldiers, with which the
Germans have been at such pains to saturate the native mind. This, in
conjunction with the suspicion which the native of German East Africa
has for any European, and more especially his horror of war, has made us
prepared to see the native bolt at our approach.

But if our task has succeeded, there has been striking ill success on
the part of the Germans in organising and inducing, in spite of their
many attempts and the obvious danger to their own women and children,